Recently i read two articles both by international media houses on certain aspects of Kerala & its people. Not everyday is your faith restored in your homeland as it was for me.

Even with the strikes and harthaals i’ve always considered my homeland as a place to be not just cos of my love for my city or state but a lot of reasons. My work has taken me places & shown me enough of what the world has to offer and honestly i am quite content that my believe was more than my sheer love for my homeland.

I see most of the human talent to be away from kerala, though its been doing well for the city in terms of inwards remittances it is also a sizable brain drain. Event start-up companies which have set roots from Kerala mostly move to bangalore or elsewhere citing infra or technical aspects.

I been an entrepreneur all my life & i love my city and i feel that the people of the great city/state should work together and work for taking the state to greater heights. As to lead by example i have ensured that my company( which is a part of a French group) stays in Kochi and keeps attracting talent to kochi and not the other way around. i know things are not perfect but its a fight worth the effort and wish you all do the same. To cement your thought here’s the abstract from the article was referring to:

“Kerala’s GDP per capita is decent by Indian standards, but not spectacular. But its superior education and health outcomes push it well up the human development ranking. It boasts the highest HDI of any Indian state. If it were a country, Kerala would rank 77th in the world – ahead of countries with much higher GDP per capita, such as Turkey, South Africa and Peru.

Productivity in some of Kerala’s smaller workshops is pre-industrial, but that’s still better than doing nothing, which is the fate of tens of millions of dispossessed workers elsewhere in India. Kerala’s government has strongly resisted the corporatization of agriculture, and this has helped it achieve the lowest rural poverty in India. Again, the contrast with the rest of the country – 200,000 desperate farmers have committed suicide in the past decade – is jarring.

Kerala’s investments in its people have, perhaps ironically, made its people one of the state’s most lucrative exports: About two million Keralans work in the Persian Gulf countries (many as doctors, nurses and engineers), sending back billions of dollars worth of remittances each year. But there is also a growing high-tech sector in Kerala itself, centred around a technology park where 25,000 people are employed in the state capital. The complex is owned by the state government but operated in partnership with global IT corporations. This funny co-existence of capitalism and socialism is called “flexible communism” by the locals.

Business owners bemoan the hassle and lost productivity resulting from the strikes and protests that are a regular feature of daily life in highly politicized Kerala. On the other hand, it’s precisely because they feel empowered to fight for their interests that Keralans have managed to win the highest standard of living in their vast, diverse country. Other parts of India lose very little work time to strikes, yet their people are demonstrably worse off.”

The other day i went for this movie – Queen with two good friends of mine. the theme/context of the movie is a perfect illustration of the women of this country. i enjoyed every bits of the movie but this post is not about that. Lately, there has been a lot of buzz around women empowerment thanks to you know who.( the one who should not be named ).

After watching the movie, my friends were on a different level of high.( Did i tell that they were of opposite sex ? ) They both wanted to travel & then discover themselves or where at a different level of self-confidence.And this is was around women’s day & i asked myself why do the world keep talking about empowering women or giving them a ‘day’.(Not that i am against having a day for men ) It sort of gave me the feeling that its like the day of the ‘endangered species’ or the inferior one.

And most of the women i have met ( at least in this country) sort of are on a hunt to find themselves or to reinvent them or then waiting to just get married. No offense, but i see women to be much superior being than its male counterpart.

May be the social stigma makes them think so or act so. But women are in my experience the strongest & superior being out there & its a shame they need someone or a ‘day’ to remind them about it or to empower them.

So this is what i have to tell to the women at large, you have the same sets of rights or talents showered upon you ( and may be even more than men ). You are designed to be superior, do not waste that flawless design of the greater being who made you by wasting over a heartbreak or thinking about the right partner to marry or in the run to make ends meet & make the society ‘happy’. Yes, i agree the world is harsh on you but you are designed to fight it all with odds favoring you.

It’s quite a difficult thing to look at yourself from a third perspective or to put in simple terms how others “really” think about you.Everyone likes to be the person who is “talked about” in the circles & i must say the task could be scarily easy difficult at the same time.

It’s one thing i learnt during my school days, there is no better publicity than bad publicity. Though unintentional i was known for the wrong reasons, almost all the time. there are moments when that really pricks you but then thats the only reason people even remember you. Now, you might tell that there are good “ways” of being remembered too. i respectfully disagree!

the good guys are equally known for their flip(bad) part, take any insanely followed leader or personality and you will know what i mean.

i started a company, ran it for some 3 years before getting acquired by a French company & i was know in select circles for the same. But the one thing that made me an instant hit was not this, it was how i turned a villain slash cunning businessman who got his partner ousted from the very firm they all started together. strangely i like the plot, interesting story…suddenly you are the anti-hero here, the dark shade in the plot. But dark plot moves word-of-mouth faster than anything is what i have learnt.Now, please don’t ask me the details around it cos i like the plot the way it is. Let me sink in for a while here.

But one thing that life has taught me is that there is no right or wrong, whatever makes you happy & keeps your loved ones safe/happy and as long your conscious is clean, don’t give a fuck!

“Be Foolish” is a celebrated term when it comes to being an innovator or a creative guy. Thanks to one man especially on making this important point pretty much on the face, Steve Jobs. he has lived his life as a living example of what he stated as well. But again, there are critics on this as well cos success by conventional has been a measure of intelligence or smart thinking or hard work and when someone comes n say ” Be Foolish”, it doesn’t go well that easy.

At a personal level, i have tried this and well the effects— thats around to be seen soon but then the important takeaway here is that to be a innovator or to create something you need to forget what you have learned, you need to be foolish and forget what logic or rules say and sometimes defy it all.

Now everyone has their own experience with this approach even in your everyday work even if you are not a innovator or entrepreneur , i mean not “yet”. i would want to hear what you think about this one habit as a requirement to be a man of ideas. come on now..this place could use some noise.

the human agony of not able to control his own thoughts i by far the worst battle everyone goes through yet, its a war that continues with no end ! Every day, every moment we are in fight with our own thoughts. i have this unique opportunity to meet people from all walks of life and though not a great socialite i endeavor it with great pride because there is nothing more fulfilling than human intellect , there is no better story than the stories of how everyone out there in their life is out for one thing- finding their purpose.

i think thats a thought every living being out there tries to figure out everyday. the idea is gets deeper roots as you age and in most cases people mistake this as a short term goal. in most cases this very thought itself is the cause of people not being happy or unsatisfied about their professional and personal life. apparently this hunt for finding purpose even sometimes replaces the idea of just ‘living’ the moment. everyone is back of something yet to come and in that preparation they forget to live today which mostly results in unsatisfied work-family life in most cases.

in some cases such thoughts are spiritual but in most, its materialistic.everyone is trying to something different in their life and thats where the problem starts. i have had the privilege of being in touch with the younger generations of managers from the best B-schools in India & the thought process is the same on how to do something different or how to come up with another facebook. This is not the case with people alone ! Organizations big or small has the same approach , in fact almsot all corporate profile or websites have one thing in common ‘ we do things differently ‘ or ‘ we think out of the box ‘ and so on. But organizations who have changed how world moves never think out of the box , instead they ‘create a new box’.

Instead of trying to find purpose, one should just live the moment and just focus as the purpose to be ‘Live’ ! its more of a balance between spiritual-materialistic calls of life but history has witnessed that great people out there are people who have understood this fact of Life and lived their life as if ‘the world would end tomorrow’. to conclude i would like to quote what steve jobs said, ‘ do not relent or rest, live as if tomorrow is your last day of life, stay foolish , stay hungry’

April 2009,Bangalore: So me & benjith had our initial project report which needed to be supported by fund. Now,I had very less of though running in my mind in terms of planning baptism of our dream. I went along with Benjith to both our close colleagues/friends seeking some help in terms of the required capital.It is during this period I realized one very important thing of Life & that is when you need help, all these social creatures that otherwise swing around our shoulders are all experts in one act which can be termed as the “Vanishing Act”.

But then both of us where big headed Bastards,we never wanted to give up on what we planned,come what may ! Unlike my partner’s family,my parents were not all that game with the idea of me starting my own business ! I cant complaint,after being from a normal middle class backgrounds where no one has a business background and more importantly I am a qualified Engineer which required/demanded me to act my breed,as of an engineer that is ! But having throughly studied my course,I knew that wasn’t my cup of tea.

Though my family wasn’t all that encouraging in my decision,I loved the feeling of “proving them all wrong one day” ! And that sweet feeling is like the greatest pleasure you can get that I could feel it even when nothing happened ! And trust me I decided to go ahead not because I had atmost faith my business plan but only because I decided to stand by decision of not following the conventional and may be that’s the reason our company had the tagline ” Conventionally Progressive” ! I know ! You must be thinking what I smoke ! Such an Irony Life is….

So then after having days spend behind finding capital in Bangalore we were so successful in getting screwed that we just wanted gt back home ! So we decided to get back to Cochin and may be find some way out ! Although one thing was decided,that we are doing it !

May be it was the city,though Cochin is more like an metro Lifestyle,people here has only one Agenda “to be better than your counterpart” but that’s one thing that changed in me in the limited period i stayed in Bangalore ! I was such an idiot not to understand that in Life the only person we need to outbeat is simply ourselves ! Just my Mantra changed and now it’s all about ” being better than what you were yesterday” ! I thank the garden city for that one lesson !

I once read that Happiness is the mastery of energy around us,though it made sense to me I never understood the real meaning of it. It said that Happiness is a science which abides basics laws of energy and the most important one was the “Laws of Attraction”,its about how the energy around us brings us what we want in Life.

I am no compromise person and it has helped me as much as it has created trouble for me,but bottom line is I don’t want to compromise.I have had the habit of believing blindly that whatever I need, my God will get it for me and he always has. And just like this I am very adamant that I would never compromise on anything in m Life and I really was surprised to find that i never had to,as if the universe would work to get me what I wanted. I have personally had a small taste of this energy and now I am trying to extend it to my Life Fully.I have seen miracles happend for people around me. The Life of my friend and now a successful actor Asif Ali is somewhat in similar lines,he simply was mad & crazy and trusted in his dreams like anything.

So branding yourself requires a lot of resources ! not just about printing cards or making website,but when i say invest in yourself i literally mean it. You need to illuminate your personality with the way you look & the kind of things you use ! Buy branded accessories or whatever is required to project yourself. I am not talking about buying things that you really don’t need or become someone you are not. Every individual has their tastes and aura which sets them apart and the way other people understand this is by their basic senses, i meant you cant educate others about yourself with slide presentation,can you ? so you need to wear what you are !

when i started of in my early days, my mode of investing myself was getting good wardrobe & accessories that’s required in business ! and there is no shortcut for this, don’t buy those cheap look alike ones,cos people that matters understand when they see whats of good quality ! i remember buying a lot of branded stuff,formal wear n googles n watches & even a phone ! these are important things you see,cos people judge by your looks ! you cant avoid that or say no to it,so its better being prepared !

Now ‘Investing yourself’ might be different for the kind of work you do ! it could be like investing yourself by doing some course or reading books or anything which makes you a step better than what you were yesterday ! So the point is,as an entrepreneur you need to know what’s required to stay ahead and you need to invest well on it !